No abstract

Unless public transportation is efficient, affordable, clean, comfortable and convenient, people would otherwise resort to drive to their destinations. The increased in the number of private vehicles on the road in Malaysia testifies to the preference of driving to work or places of leisure for many reasons. It could also quite easily point to the ailing public transport industry save for a few developed countries that are endowed with an enviable public transport system. The overall improvement of public transportation augmented with selective restrictions of private vehicle use would invariably improve the utilization of public transportation. This article proposes a conceptual model to assess perceived Bus transport utilization. It uses a categorical survey method to identify the preferences of Bus commuters to assess utilization. This conceptual model also allows managers to identify cost effective strategies within the model that are readily implementable within a relatively short duration to improve the utilization. In addition, the model is flexible enough to allow customization by management to improve the utilization within its own set of constraints.

The Malaysian tourism industry has flourished considerably over the years due to the growth of new tourist landmarks, together with its rich cultural heritage. The industry generated 6.78% of the total income from exports in 2008. This paper focuses on the dynamic relationship between macroeconomic factors and tourism revenue in Malaysia from January 2002 to December 2008. In this context, the authors investigate the presence of seasonal fluctuations in tourism revenue and examine the macroeconomic factors influencing the five top tourist-generating countries for Malaysia.

This article discusses the applications and the results of the autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) forecasting model to predict the international tourist arrivals into Malaysia using the monthly data from January 2002 through December 2007. Based on the arrivals and the average length of stay, the revenue was computed and the time series forecast model was fitted to estimate the total revenue for the Malaysian tourism industry. International arrivals into Malaysia remained resilient and have been dominant by Asian visitors. The five Asian countries, namely Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand, Brunei, and China, together accounted for 75.3% of the international tourist arrivals into Malaysia and contributed to 66.5%, of the Malaysian tourism revenue for the year 2007. The forecasting models were also fitted for tourists coming into Malaysia from these five countries for future planning and managerial applications. It is worthwhile to mention that the forecasted arrivals and revenue for the year 2008 almost coincide with the actual Malaysian official tourism figures and the variation is negligible, which strengthens the validity and the robustness of the fitted models.

The S2-EWMA (called the S square exponentially weighted moving average) control chart is effective in detecting small and moderate process variance shifts. Previously, the chart was designed based on the assumption that the distribution of the quality characteristic is normally distributed. This study designs the S2-EWMA control chart for skewed distributions. The skewed distributions considered in this paper are the lognormal and gamma distributions. The performance of the S2-EWMA control chart is compared with that of the traditional Shewhart S-chart, in terms of median run length (MRL), based on simulation using the Statistical Analysis System (SAS). The results show that regardless of the type of skewed distributions, sample size and skewness level, , in most of the cases, the S2-EWMA chart outperforms the S-chart. Moreover, the findings reveal that the MRL performances of the S-chart and S2-EWMA chart are significantly influenced by skewed distributions.